Many industries obtain, assign, and/or distribute inventory to a large number of customers. For such industries, it is challenging to manage available inventory. For example, it can be difficult to predict when the available inventory will be consumed and more will be needed. In such instances, the inventory may be unavailable when it is needed, resulting in delays and other obstacles in providing inventory to customers.
In the telecommunications industry, companies often purchase a large amount of licenses from a vendor to be able to assign a license to a customer in connection with the services and/or products provided. However, many vendors provide licenses to a variety of different software, hardware, telephony features, or services to a company. These licenses are frequently assigned to customers at different intervals. For example, licenses to a circuit path into a network for making telephone calls may be assigned more frequently than licenses to a call forwarding feature. Thus, license inventories are used at different rates. Moreover, if some license inventory is depleted, there can be delays in activating a license for a customer, in providing a service or feature to a customer, or in connecting a customer to a communications network.
Besides the problem of exhausting license inventory, without knowledge of the availability of certain licenses, technicians in the field may not be able to activate certain features during installation resulting in inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction. For example, when connecting a new customer to a communications network, a field technician generally travels to a customer site to provide installation services, including connecting the customer to the network and providing access to designated software, hardware, features, or services. In doing this, the field technician also needs to assign various licenses to the customer. In some conventional systems, it is often difficult to determine whether a particular license is available until the field technician attempts to assign the license to the customer. If the pool of available licenses from the vendor has been exhausted, the field technician will be unable to complete the installation. As a result, the installation is delayed until: new licenses are purchased from or provided temporarily by the vendor; a permanent license is assigned to the customer; and the field technician returns or remotely completes the installation.
It is with these observations in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.